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How People Broadcast Their Locations Without Meaning To

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-face-is-broadcasting-an-ip-address dept.

wjousts writes "Smartphones include geotagging features that many people aren't aware of, MIT's Technology Review reports. And it's not just in the obvious places: 'For example, by looking at the location metadata stored with pictures posted through one man's anonymous Twitter account, the researchers were able to pinpoint his likely home address. From there, by cross-referencing this location with city records, they found his name. Using that information, the researchers went on to find his place of work, his wife's name, and information about his children.'"

4 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Duh. by _0xd0ad · · Score: 5, Informative

    I might as well also point out that 4chan strips the EXIF data from uploaded images for exactly this reason.

  2. Privacy disinterest come home to roost by dtmos · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The lack of interest in personal privacy is probably the 21st Century's social movement that most surprised me. If someone had told me in 1991 that in 20 years people would want to publish their personal photographs to the world, and announce to everyone literate when they would be out of town, I would have said they were nuts: They're obviously risky behaviors in which no thinking person would engage.

    How wrong I was.

    1. Re:Privacy disinterest come home to roost by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 5, Informative

      mogrify -strip *.jpg will do!

    2. Re:Privacy disinterest come home to roost by sglewis100 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Most people don't intend to post pics with geo-information tagged in it. Cameras starting adding the data as the "default" option a couple years ago, and no one (except nerds) took notice. So now we have millions of pictures floating around with lat/long data encoded in them. I couldn't believe cameras chose to embed the data automatically -- that's where the real disbelief is. Humans probably would turn it off if they knew it was on.

      Oh please. People check into FourSquare or Facebook religiously, and tweet that they are leaving for vacation, and then come home and post pictures for the world to see. The problem isn't that they are unaware their location can be tracked. It's that they are proud to broadcast it. Actually problem is the wrong word for me to use... they don't see it as a problem.